#139: Student Loans, Being Asian in American, Coddling, Work & Status

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#1 Student Loans

We often hear we are in a student loan crisis. Adam argues it isn’t as bad as we might expect. Even if the numbers make sense, I think he missed a collective psychological aspect that many young people feel. People have felt that debt is a bad thing and having $50,000 feels terrible even if its perfectly reasonable that you’ll be able to pay it back.

I don’t think forgiveness is a good idea, but simpler payback options, being able to declare bankruptcy and more accountability for colleges seem like something worth considering.

#2 Coddling

I just finished Jon Haidt’s book Coddling of the American Mind. It was a good read arguing that there is a dramatic generation shift underway starting with people born in the mid-90s. They were raised differently and have different mental models of justice, equality, harm and fairness. As this generation enters the workforce, many companies are struggling to adapt with these new models of power, status and hierarchy. I think this will lead to a lot of good improvements with work but also a lot more chaos like we’re seeing at google already.

Not sure I recommend the whole book, but recommend checking the longform article of the same title, which I likely shared a few years back.

#3 Status Games

Agnes Callard on the status games we play

In an academic context, I’ve noticed that complaining about how busy one is hits a sweet spot of oppression—I cannot manage my life!—and importance—because I am so in demand! When you’re playing with a master, it can be hard to tell which game you’re in.

and the challenge of thinking about the morals and ethics of the tradeoffs between optimizing for empathy and excellence

There is a philosophical conundrum at the root of all this: morality requires we maintain a safety net at the bottom that catches everyone—the alternative is simply inhumane—but we also need an aspirational target at the top, so as to inspire us to excellence, creativity and accomplishment. In other words, we need worth to come for free, and we also need it to be acquirable. And no philosopher—not Kant, not Aristotle, not Nietzsche, not I—has yet figured out how to construct a moral theory that allows us to say both of those things.

+Also recommend status-as-a-service by Eugene Wei

#4 “An Invisible Person”

Wesley Yang reflecting on life as an Asian-American man:

Millions of Americans must feel estranged from their own faces. But every self-estranged individual is estranged in his own way. I, for instance, am the child of Korean immigrants, but I do not speak my parents’ native tongue. I have never called my elders by the proper honorific, “big brother” or “big sister.” I have never dated a Korean woman. I don’t have a Korean friend. Though I am an immigrant, I have never wanted to strive like one.
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Here is what I sometimes suspect my face signifies to other Americans: an invisible person, barely distinguishable from a mass of faces that resemble it. A conspicuous person standing apart from the crowd and yet devoid of any individuality. An icon of so much that the culture pretends to honor but that it in fact patronizes and exploits. Not just people “who are good at math” and play the violin, but a mass of stifled, repressed, abused, conformist quasi-robots who simply do not matter, socially or culturally.

Powerful read, especially after living in Asia for the past couple of years and reflecting on my interactions with many Asian-American friends.

#5 Work Identity

Carl Martin on shutting down his startup and grappling with the fact that he is not a worker:

It might have taken me ten years, but I now recognise placing so much weight of my identity in my work was a bad life choice. Especially as I recognise now that I am so much more, but have for whatever reason have chosen not to acknowledge it.

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